Or so says the TNT Travel Show, which surveyed over 1,o00 Brits aged 18 to 35 ahead of its annual travel exhibition in London in March.

Supposedly modern methods of travel research, such as scouring social media-led efforts for ideas for travel recommendations, were favoured by just 14% of those in the survey.

This compared to almost three-quarters (73%) who claimed to prefer word-of-mouth as the best method of getting tips when researching a trip.

Of course, a survey commissioned by an exhibition which features over 100 stands from brands giving word-of-mouth advice would be expected to say as much.

But the results are still interesting.

Travel blogs, lest we forget about their impact on travel planning, appear to be almost nowhere on the radar as influential channels to find advice on places to go, scoring a lowly 13% in the poll.

So perhaps this new generation of supposedly tech-savvy travellers are just a bunch of luddites after all?

According to the survey, 85% of Blackberry users and 68% of iPhones owners would leave their mobiles at home when travelling, preferring (90%) to simply pack a camera (presumably a digital one!).

But surely the cool kids would still be logging into their social networks and updating their own travel blogs when on the road?

Nope.

Three out of ten would prefer to use email to keep in touch, compared to a quarter that use Facebook, 16% opting for SMS text messages, 15% with Skype, 12% preferring to call, 1% via Twitter.

NB: Backpacker image via Shutterstock.

Forget Google and its push into the travel industry for a moment – less talked about is its drive to define how companies handle their web logistics.

One of the latest pushes from Google is for Google Apps, a stable of Google products under one umbrella, refining cloud technology so businesses can reap the benefits of its speed, accessibility and storage.

And in an industry full of skinny startups, perhaps such tools are a must.

So, what are the business benefits?

UK broadcaster ITV recently become a high profile convert to the service, meaning its employees can use Google Mail, Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs to share and co-author documents.

Advantages include:

1. Cost

One of the most immediate benefits for an SME over traditional desktop software is cost savings. Google Apps includes the advantage of an unlimited number of user accounts, access to all Google’s applications.

2. Email

Gmail is designed so employees can spend less time managing their inboxes, and, by definition, more time being productive – even when they’re not at their desks. The apps offer mobile e-mail, calendar and internet access – with several options for accessing information on the move.

3. Existing kit

For switchers another benefit is that you can continue to use the familiar Microsoft Outlook for email, contacts and calendar as you make the transition to Google equivalents ensuring a smooth transition.

4. Storage

Employees benefit from 25GB of email storage, 50 times more than the usual limits, this allows people to keep important correspondence without having to worry about going over storage limits, as well as accessing them with a built-in search feature while on the move.

5. Reliability

With a 99.9% uptime reliability guarantee, Google claims the Apps will be available continuously, so you and your employees could be more productive. Research indicates that Microsoft Exchange typically has 60 minutes of unplanned downtime per month. Google Apps customers typically experience less than 15 minutes of downtime per month. This could produce some small efficiency savings and could certainly reduce stress levels.

6. Syncing

With synchronous replication, your data and activity in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites is simultaneously preserved in multiple secure data centres. If one data centre is unable to serve your requests, the system is designed to instantly fall back to another data centre that can serve your account with no interruption in service. You’ll be able to access the data stream interchanging between, say, you iPhone, iPad, laptop or PC, Handy for people on the move.

7. Security

Your company’s information will be safe and secure. Many financial services customers trust this system with highly sensitive corporate data.  SME’s can choose from a range of security features including:

• Automatic bespoke spam and mail filtering.
• Information sharing rules to determine how broadly your employees can share with Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Sites.
• Individual password criteria and visual strength indicators to help employees pick secure passwords.
• Enforced SSL connections with Google Apps to ensure secure HTTPS access.
• Optional email archiving, with up to ten years of retention.

8. Customisation

You can customize Google Apps to meet your own technical, branding and business requirements.  If you do business on-line, integration options let you connect Google Apps to your existing IT infrastructure.  Put another way, with Google Apps your place of business is wherever you and/or your colleagues happen to be. Being in Dubai will effectively be the same as sitting at your desk.

In short, for SME businesses, Google Apps will be a valuable and efficient tool, which is only set to improve as the range of apps on the Google marketplace expands.

In addition, with the arrival of HTML 5 in the next year or two, this will allow approximately 50 times the power of present mobile devices.

Familiarising yourself and your workforce with these apps will put you ahead of the game in terms of making the transition to total mobile data access.

NB: This is a guest post Lee Stretton from SEO and digital marketing advisors AddPeople.

In the past, companies running contests may have instructed participants merely to “like” their Facebook pages, invite friends and post an update or photo etc., but the submission options now are broadening as mobile technology and social media evolve.

Witness the latest American Airlines sweepstakes, which is geared to highlight its variety of mobile offerings.

American Airlines instructs contest participants to take photos related to weekly questions about their travel plans and the airline’s apps, and to submit the images through one or all of five “channels:”

• Online at AA.com/promo;

• Email to AApic@fly.aa.com;

• Facebook at Facebook.com/AA;

• Twitter using hastag #AApic;

• Instagram using hashtag #AApic.

In fact, in flexing its multichannel muscles, AA tells sweepstakes contestants they can enter up to five times weekly by simply submitting their photos once through each of the different channels.

Spreading the wealth in this way is great for the airline’s social media presence, online traffic, overall engagement with consumers and, of course, it will drive more awareness about American Airlines’ mobile services.

The grand prize winner of the sweepstakes, which runs through Sept. 27, wins 280,000 AAdvantage miles, enough for two economy-class roundtrip tickets between the U.S. and Europe, South America, Japan or China, the airline says.

The other four weekly winners will get Nikon D3000 digital cameras.

But, through its multi-channel approach, perhaps American Airlines will emerge as the biggest winner of all.

The original bulletin posted yesterday (Thurs 24) morning by officials rightly highlighted that members do not submit credit card details or financial information to TripAdvisor.

But the growing number of hotels and other organisations buying premium features via the Business Listings service do share such details with TripAdvisor.

Following the bulletin posted on the site and a further email sent to consumer members from CEO Steve Kaufer, TripAdvisor for Business president Christine Petersen has now sent an message to all customers stressing that only email addresses had been stolen.

Petersen continues:

“Any other information you have shared with us, such as your name, address, title, and credit card or bank information, is still secure. We will continue to take all appropriate measures to keep your personal information secure at TripAdvisor.”

There is still scant information emerging from TripAdvisor as to the circumstances surrounding the theft, which is believed to have taken place last weekend.

Officials so far have confirmed “a portion” of the 20 million-strong database was stolen and that law enforcement agencies are involved in the investigation.

The company has posted a message outlining some details of the incident, which supposedly took place “recently” and involves an undisclosed number of member email detail taken from the system.

Officials are keen to stress that the company does not collect credit card details or any other financial information, but it is warning members that they may receive some “unsolicited emails” as a result of incident.

In an additional statement, the official says:

“We sincerely apologise to our affected members for this inconvenience and are implementing additional security precautions to help prevent another incident in the future.

Such is the seriousness of the breach, agencies from outside the company are now said to be looking into the theft, although it is unclear whether the investigation is taking place at one of its international offices or the headquarters in Massachusetts, US.

“While we’re still investigating the details, we’ve identified the vulnerability, shut it down and are vigorously pursuing the matter with law enforcement.”

The bulletin to members goes on to explain how they might be able to identify any unsolicited emails in the future and how to deal with them.

How such a major incident could have taken place may well emerge in the coming weeks, but while TripAdvisor’s transparency with coming forward immediately to notify members should be applauded, such openness elsewhere may also shed some light on some of the wider IT practices within the company.

Seven months ago, technical manager Sanjay Vakil wrote in the Y Combinator forums that TripAdvisor developers have “root access on EVERY box”, meaning that technical staff could essentially see all files, delete them and add them from a server.

Vakil’s comments were lambasted by other developers and technicians in the forum:

“Ugh. I understand the principle of empowering developers, but some basic security would be nice…” wrote one member at the time.

Another added: ”Yeah, I wonder who cleans up after this. The guy who has root ‘just because we give it to all developers’ and makes a mess and seriously breaks the production site is most likely not the person you want cleaning it up when time is of the essence.”

There is no indication at all at this stage whether the theft was carried out by individuals within the company or from the outside.

In fact, one of the subtext topics of a conference session this week at ITB in Berlin is: “What will be the most impactful communication channels for travel distribution in 2011 for suppliers, intermediaries and travel companies?”

The session is also due to discuss reaching the most important segments.

The question says:

“If you are thinking about focusing to reach the three most important target audiences for travel in Europe. What is the most important one to focus in 2011? And in 2015?”

Boomers

20-30 single, couples, no kids

Families

This got me thinking – what about the next generation which is coming up behind the current group (Gen-Y)?

Actually having a two of those in the family it appears they act very differently to each other and to the generations that have preceded them.

Coincidently, two recent studies on this group caught my eye. One that has received a lot of air and net time is the latest CDC study on sex and the American individual.

This highlighted that today’s teens are not as interested in sex as earlier. The number of teens who have not tried sex has fallen. In my local newspaper, the Seattle Times, there was a great quote:

“‘It’s not even on my radar,’ said 17-year-old Abbey King of Hinsdale, Illinois, a competitive swimmer who starts her day at 5 am and falls into bed at 10:30 pm after swimming, school, weight lifting, running, more swimming, homework and a volunteer gig working with service dogs for the disabled.”

The other study is from eMarketer and Ipsos, Media Usage and Shopping Habits of Teens.

Delving into teen behavior is important to see how they will act when they hit the marketplace as adults.

The clear – and obvious – message is that this generation is tech-savvy and very social.

The definition of social is far broader than existed in other generations. Their lust for technology seems to accelerate every year.

As one parent of a four year old told me, he was shocked to hear his child come home from nursery school, head to her computer and announce: “I am sorry, Daddy, no time for videos I have home work to do on my computer.”

The social internet is similarly indispensable.

More than four in five teens will use social networks this year, eMarketer estimates, compared to 64% of all internet users.

Nearly three-quarters of teens will use Facebook monthly this year, and Ipsos Public Affairs found in 2010 that over 50% visited the site daily.

I believe this number is under-reporting the impact. I asked a number of teenagers to try a little experiment to count the number of times they interacted with their mobile phone.

The numbers were staggering, but understandable. The teens I asked seemed to check their messages and interact with their phones more than 50 times a DAY!

When I did the same thing myself I found that I, too, was checking my tree mobile devices even more when I am travelling.

Their behavior online is different than their predecessors. The tend to eschew email and prefer the messaging systems in Facebook and, of course, texting.

They all seem to suffer ADD which will likely drive more iCommerce (Instant Commerce and Flash sales) type activity. Web browsing is not something that grabs their attention.

Wikipedia is their trusted source, despite all the exhortations while in school that Wikipedia is not to be regarded as a quotable source, and it remains one of the first places when teens search for hard information – but not nearly as trusted as from their friends and social network.

But perhaps one trend that is critical to the future is the need for validation – perhaps the one trend that will transcend through early adulthood into maturity.

This generation will seek validation more than any other. This will be important in purchase and in researching options especially in travel.

The message for travel marketers is clear. Engagement with your community better be real and it better be deep. That means content cannot be allowed to get stale. Information must be reliable and your apps better be really fast.

Or else you face the ultimate ignominy – you will be ignored.

The cathedral was severely damaged in the quake which hit the city on Tuesday this week, with 75 dead so far, hundreds injured and widespread destruction to buildings and streets.

Unconfirmed reports say some people were killed when part of the famous cathedral collapsed during the quake.

Expedia officials have blamed marketing colleagues in its London office for the blunder. Australia and New Zealand boss Nicolas Chu says its promos are created and sent from the UK, but apologised for any “insensitivity”.

The faux pas came to light after subscribers to the email started slamming Expedia in social networks such as Twitter for including the artwork in the bulletin.

Later versions of the promo featured a mountain landscape view  from New Zealand instead of the cathedral.

Other web companies have taken a more helpful approach in the wake with the disaster. Within hours of the main tremor, Google had created a Crisis Response page, allowing users to locate the nearest medical units in the city on a map and register if they are looking for friends or relatives.

NB: Thanks to a reader for the image.

One of the top discussions among hotel marketers today is about cutting costs and growing revenues in this tough market.

Most now have a clear idea that online is where the growth is, and direct is where the profit comes from. The big confusion is whether to run their online marketing campaigns with in-house team or outsource it as many others do now.

TPI, an outsourcing advisory firm, says:

“More than $24.7 billion of outsourced contracts were dished out in the fourth quarter last year – up 8% year over year.”

So, how does a hotel plan it’s in-house or outsource strategy? Here’s a five-step plan:

1. List the activities your team does currently

Create a list of all online marketing activities your hotel staff perform on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. This would be the base of your further plans. Evaluate these activities with the returns it generates.

This would help you prioritise the activities better. Is your marketing staff more productive at offline deals? If yes, then let them do that more than the Facebook updates.

2. Add other online channels that might help you grow faster

Any hotel planning to succeed beyond 2011 has to be ready with four major online channels:

• Search engines: Google & Bing (Yahoo).
• Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, YouTube & Linkedin
• Mobile: Mobile optimized website, mobile seo, short code & bulk text(sms)
• Email: Newsletters, deals.

Ask yourself, where your hotel stands currently on each on these marketing channels. Are you just present there, or thriving with activity, conversations and engagement?

3. Assess your team’s channel knowledge and proficiency

Once you know the major channels to grow futher, do a self-analysis of your current team. A team with half-baked knowledge and action-plan could do more harm than good. Tools (free or paid) could help your team handle most activities in a quicker, easier way.

Ask these questions for a Yes/No:

• Does your team’s age and attitude go with the conversational skills needed for new-age channels?
• Is you team well-trained to handle the intricacies of all four major online channels?
• Is your team well-equipped with the right tools in place to run the campaigns effectively on each channel?

4. Can someone perform better than our in-house team?

Management basics teach us to try and accomplish every goal at the lowest cost possible. Even if your team can handle most part of your campaign, check their efficiency and whether the effort leads to better results.

To reach your ultimate goal in the most cost-efficient manner takes time and practice. Ask the right questions to firms which bid for running your online marketing campaign. Make a clear description of your goals and do not compromise on measuring them among deliverables.

The professional ones would offer a plan which aligns with hotel’s goals.

5. Track your staff’s cost efficiency

Ultimately, what matters is the running cost and efficiency in achieving your business goal – whether you outsource or not. In this tough economic scenario, every dollar saved is a gain on the bottomline.

First, find the cost of running your campaigns in-house with your staff count, their salary, training, tool costs, and other expenses, then calculate how many of your monthly or yearly bookings could be attributed directly to this expense.

Simple formula: Total Revenue from Channel – Campaign Costs = Profits

Now, establish the percentage profit for each channel in your total revenue, and sort these into ascending order. This would provide the most productive channel break up run by your team.

Let these numbers help you decide your effort and budget for the next month or quarter.

Conclusion

With your in-house cost to get bookings known, you can make an informed decision. More often than not, your in-house staff can run your online campaigns at the lowest cost – the trick is in empowering them with the right training and tools to do this efficiently.

Check out the outsourcing firms only when you have your in-house numbers clearly known. If the outsourcing firm specializes in your segment, aligns to your goals perfectly, and achieves them at a lower cost than yours’ – go ahead, and outsource.

NB: This is a guest article by Norma Brandt of HotelMarketingClub.com, an agency specialising in growing direct bookings using search, training, social media, email and mobile marketing.

SUM will placing digital ads online and in emails through the parent site but, but importantly, as well as through its network of partner sites targeted to college students and youth.

The idea, like many media extension programmes, is to offer a reach deal across multiple – often hundreds of – sites for a single advertiser, effectively saving the brand time and effort having individual relationships with each target site.

SUM says it is also getting into the consultancy business for travel advertisers in need of marketing services to reach the student and young travelling audience.

The annual BigMouthMedia Online Travel Report found that – for the industry as a whole – the level of marketing spend on social media would account for 8% of total budget, edging ahead of email marketing with 7%.

Looking at individual sectors, only airlines marketers say email activity will continue to capture a bigger share of their budgets ahead of social media (10% vs 6%). Both online travel agencies and hotels say social media will grab 8% of spend, tour operators giving 6%.

The overall marketing spend mix for all sectors is as follows:

• Paid search – 36%
• SEO – 20%
• Display advertising – 16%
• Affiliate marketing – 10%
• Social media – 8%
• Email – 7%

Other notable data in the survey around the rise of social media as a marketing channel includes the resources used or people allocated to manage a company’s activity:

• 1 person – 24%
• 2 persons – 8%
• 3 persons – 2%
• Non-dedicated resource – 37%
• No resource – 22%
• Agency – 7%

But perhaps rather worryingly, as many marketers (38%) say they do not measure the ROI of a campaign as those that do.

For those that do measure social media ROI, direct bookings came out on top as the most popular metric (30%), followed by fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter (25%), web traffic (20%), interactions and conversations (15%) and reviews added (5%).

NB: Full report and methodology (Tnooz assisted in the promotion of the survey) is available from BigMouthMedia.

But I definitely do not share the attitude provided by one of the leading players in the sector, Peter Dennis, chairman of the Travel Technology Initiative, when he opined recently that social media was a fad. Oops…

The number one online activity remains email but the amount of time spent in social media has now overtaken the traditional leader.

A study from eMarketer published two weeks ago was based on a study taken around the world by research firm TNS.

Fortunately for those like me who prefer email, it seems that we still do it daily more than we manage our social profiles. Or, if you wish, this means those of us who read their email daily are sadder than those who prefer Facebook.

One thing I do feel is that social networks (Facebook vs Twitter) are the norm but the amount of junk being shoved down the FB pipe to users is causing a backlash.

The user communities are not necessarily going to put up with Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg shoving more advertising to them. It will also hurt the brands that are allowed to advertise. The behavior again is different than the survey responses.

So email will be with us for a very long time – but I am not sure that the long form is going to be as common.

I was chatting to two friends who are Arabs from the Middle East. We discussed the beauty of language. If you even have the chance to read Arabic poetry in its native form or even in its translated form, the beauty of its brevity and meaning in such few words can be breathtaking.

Sadly in the English language world quality of language has been pushed aside in favor of shorthand, TLAs and corruption of the finer points of the lingo. I have been involved in localization for many years.

Using the English language as the model always causes us some grief because it is more descriptive than other languages because vocabulary enables greater precision and thus allows fewer words to be used in online websites.

Thus the English language takes up less physical space than other languages. Let’s hope we keep trying to allow the quality of language to shine through and yes even in email.

I wonder if we will ever see the collected emails of any of today’s luminaries (like Cheryl Cole or Paris Hilton) as a bestseller like the letters of Dr Johnson.

The company gave its flagship US business first try with the new look in late-June this year after finally disclosing the long awaited changes to its online offering would be made just a few weeks before.

Recently installed chief executive Chris Loughlin says the changes to the UK site will be rolled out across its other country sites, including Australia, Canada, China and Spain in due course.

The next site on the roadmap is expected to be Germany in a few weeks.

The new websites feature a cleaner, open feel, are 1024 pixels wide, compared with the former version, which was 800 pixels by 600 pixels.

Instead of the existing Cheap Flights, Holiday Deals and Cruise Deals heading three busy-looking columns, the redesigned homepage has a Find Deals section in the middle section of the page with new search functionality, enabling consumers to search by destination, keyword and deal locator.

More from Travelzoo as it starts to overhaul its online presence and face challenges from new distribution channels.

The travel deals publisher says it is committed to its popular and long-running weekly Top 20 email bulletin despite the rapid rise of social networks as primary communication channels.

“I do not see anything on the horizon yet that suggests email is not a brilliant method of reaching our subscribers,” says European managing director Chris Loughlin who takes over as CEO in July 2010.

The company currently has 20 million subscribers around the world to its weekly blast of offers and deals.

But numerous studies have pointed to how email is no longer the automatic gateway to consumers it once was, especially amongst younger web users who have embraced sites such as Facebook as their main method of interacting with each other and brands online.

Loughlin says the company has made a number of efforts this year to push the brand into networks such as Facebook, building up a base of potential customers through Fan Pages.

The personalised email suggested that as a passenger due to fly with the airline they will need to obtain electronic travel authorisation (the ESTA scheme) from the United States Department of Homeland Security.

The email went on to explain how the system works and looked forward to welcoming the recipient onboard.

Unfortunately anybody included in the Continental database from any of the 35 countries on the US’s Visa Waiver scheme, including the UK,  Australia, France and Spain, received the bulletin.

This included those without any scheduled tickets with the airline and those who have only used the airline as part of a codeshare agreement with partner carriers.

The mistake was corrected five hours later when recipients of the original email were sent an apology ensuring them “contact information has not been affected and that you were not intended to receive that e-mail”.

Continental has since admitted the mistake and said extra checks are now in place to prevent the same error occurring again.

An officials says:

“The message was to go to customers scheduled on upcoming flights yet it was inadvertently sent to all customers in our database that reside in visa waiver countries and who had previously given us their contact info. We realize this was confusing to customers, especially those who didn’t have upcoming travel scheduled, and have apologized.”

The company’s UK division heads a list of notable travel firms including EasyJet, Ryanair and Travelodge that perform strongly with downstream traffic from email bulletins.

The margin in January 2010 between the top three sites is tiny – 0.01% separating Travelzoo, EasyJet and Google Maps – but the publishing of the popular Top 20 weekly newsletter is keen to put its efforts into context against some of its larger rivals in the online travel sector.

The Experian Hitwise figures put Travelzoo’s share at three times as high as that of Expedia and twice as much as British Airways.

However, Travelzoo has conceded that positions at the higher reaches of the chart could change if the figures were more inclusive of the wider email marketing sector.

The current data only supports downstream traffic to travel websites from free email providers such as Hotmail and GMail, understandably missing out on capturing traffic from any client-based service such as Microsoft Outlook and Entourage.

Travelzoo says it believes the traffic share from wider sources would be similar but admits EasyJet’s customer base of business travellers would probably use corporate or client-based email services for ticketing and therefore traffic is not included in the Hitwise data.

The highest trafficked sites by share of downstream visits from email (UK, January 2001):

1. Travelzoo UK
2. EasyJet
3. Google Maps UK
4. Ryanair
5. Travelodge
6. Google Maps
7. National Rail Enquiries
8. British Airways
9. Thomson
10. Lastminute.com

For its part, Travelzoo says:

“We understand the data doesn’t include all Outlook or client hosted email boxes, but we would assume that share would be similar among those applications – we can’t think of any reason why it would be different. We don’t break down how the percentage of traffic received from client site vs. web based email boxes.”

OK, so I am really comfortable with email. I have been an Outlook user since I beta’d the first office suites when I was at Microsoft with the Office 1997 version.

So here we are more than ten years later and I still prefer it over all the other tools I have tried and abandoned.

Now its Office 2010 beta. It’s pretty useful and has some nice new features.

I thought that Office 2007 was a major upgrade and so far to me while there are nice new features 2010 is not as ground breaking.

I have tried to use the free tools like Google Docs and Open Office. I even went cold turkey for a week – well that lasted two days before I returned to the fold.

I do like Office for the Mac 2008. It has nice features. I may yet cross over to the dark side in the next year and go to the Mac. My old G3 Mac no longer functions for anything but the minimalist of tasks.

So, it would seem I am not alone. I recently saw an interesting study courtesy of eMarketer.

The survey shows that the primary source of content sharing is email. I believe this to be so for people like me.

However it is no longer the unique source of my information sharing services. This year – my Christmas greeting will be via Facebook, Twitter and my blog [here it is].

My private email users will get the email I usually do and if your one of the (un)lucky people a Christmas Greeting is probably due to you in the next 24 hours.

I have a quite a few friends who have moved their primary social interaction tool to Facebook. [So far I have yet to find someone who communicates exclusively via Twitter and I really hope I don’t!].

I have also noticed a trend among professional people who have abandoned their use of Facebook for personal stuff.

The ability to control personal vs professional remains a challenge for the Big Kahuna of social media. And its not getting any better. So despite the new privacy rules I have now essentially withdrawn my personal info from FB as well.

I never liked the phone and still don’t. So my usage – as measured in total minutes over the past decade has fallen dramatically. However my digital volume of email as measured in the respective growth of my PST files has accelerated.

Email has clearly evolved. I still get way too much and I am struggling to keep up. I need to revisit my filters again.

I have unsubscribed to a wide variety of newsletters in the past year. I seldom have time to read RSS feeds – again there is just too much data out there. I have found that the tools are getting better. Two of my favorite Outlook Add-ins are:

• YouSendIt – this is a great tool for sending sub 100MB files.
• Xobni – a great info manager.

I highly recommend both, however the latter is still unstable in Office2007 and will likely be so in 2010 although so far it does suffer from some annoying mis-features such as the occupation of valuable real estate on the screen and some inframe nav issues.

So for now I will continue to use email as my primary communication tool. Am I a Luddite, I don’t think so – but you might disagree.

The Norway and Australia-based community company has developed a system where anyone can email the site with a country or city name in the subject field and almost instantaneously receive reams of travel content in an email or PDF.

The founders claim it is one of a kind in the travel space as most other online content publishers require the guide to be organised on the website or a fee is charged to the customer.

The email and PDFs include information relating to transport, hotels, sights, tours, restaurants, weather, events and internet connection.

Around 3,100 articles can be obtained using the system, which launched today.

The London guide, for example, arrived within ten minutes of sending the email and with a 26-page PDF of information and destination content.

Co-founder Sam Daams says the content is aggregated from the site’s own wiki-based platform which is created by the TP membership.

“No need to download an app, search online or have an iPhone – it works on all phones with email,” he adds.

The next stage is to explore whether instantaneous edits can be integrated, so a user can send in a tip about piece of information about a destination and it immediately appear in the next downloaded guide.

Daams says the main idea is to make contributing and sharing information a lot easier than it is today, simply because users are forced to connect at an app or browser level.

The service is planned to be available to anyone and remain free, Daams says, stressing that it feels “wrong” to charge for what is effectively Creative Commons licensed wiki content from its own site.

“It’s always been our model to give away all the services, content and information for free, creating a vibrant, active community in return.”